Colleagues, welcome to Canberra.
It’s good to be together here for my first Council of Australian Governments meeting.
I want to stress to all of you that as far as I am concerned this is a meeting of equals. This is a meeting of sovereign governments. It is not an opportunity for the Commonwealth to lecture the states. I hope it won’t be an opportunity for the states to fight with the Commonwealth. I certainly don’t want us to be Liberal versus Labor because, let’s face it; all of us have our own issues to wrestle with.
As far as is humanly possible I want all of us to get on with the issues of government in our own jurisdictions but where there is overlap, where there is the necessity of cooperation it should be constructive, it should be collegial and it should be motivated by a concern for the overall best interests of our states and our country, and that is what I intend to do as the COAG Chairman today. As far as is humanly possible bring us together on the issues that we have in common.
As I dare say many of you know from your conversations with me over the years, I was a philosophical federalist, I became as a Minister in the Howard Government a pragmatic nationalist, and since I have become party leader I have become a pragmatic federalist.
I think pragmatic federalism is what we need in modern Australia and that is what we will do our best to implement in the hours ahead today.
So, thanks very much colleagues and I’m looking forward to a good meeting.
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